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Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

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Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#221

Post by robotnikman »

theturtletalks wrote: post #128
Balvarez wrote: post #61

It seems to me companies should instead invest in open source alternatives. They could pay less, funding the development of open source alternatives and everyone wins. Blender is a good example of this.

Yes there are so many open-source alternatives to popular SaaS nowadays and more are popping up. The barrier of building a great application has gone down significantly the past 4-5 years. I'm work on building an extensive alternatives list here: https://opensource.builders . Which commercial product is Blender an open-source alternative to?

Autodesk 3ds Max comes to mind

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#222

Post by jariel »

armatav wrote: post #214
jariel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain." $200K is not a good benchmark for what companies spend. Median salary in the US is about $50K [1] Average overhead per/employee is 18-26% [2] So a $10K spend for 10% increase in productivity on someone earning about $60K ... is not a bargain. But there's a problem with this, because SaaS can be 1) Individual productivity 2) Operational produc…

Median salary for a software engineer in the US is not $50k... And the productivity increase using certain SaaS tools is not 10%, it can be an order of magnitude in certain instances. https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-... https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S... https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engin…

This is not about 'software developers' it's about industry at large paying subscriptions for a variety of services.

The vast majority of users of SaaS are not software developers.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#224

Post by nnq »

vkou wrote: post #104
76543210 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bigger concerns is that it creates dependency, prices go up, and you either deal with it, or you change systems which is hugely costly. FOSS as much as possible.

FOSS is free if your time is worthless. There's plenty of situations in business where using it is an incredibly good idea. There's even more situations where you're better off just paying for a service.

Nobody truly believes "FOSS is free"... sure there's cost, you just gotta figure out what the cost is for you! (that's the trick a "free" product has a unique price for each "buyer", here in lies the beauty and the opportunity of the game). There's no "market price" so it's tricky, but when you can compute the cost and it happens to be very low for your team (and preferably high for competitor's teams), you have a competitive advantages.

OSS is all about leveraging "hidden" advantages agains competitors that have clear and obvious financial advantages over you. If you get it right, you win!

Of course, if you don't like risks and don't like "uncomputable" prices, or "prices unique to each buyer", then sure, be conservative, and stay away from FOSS.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#225

Post by runforthehills »

JakeWesorick wrote: post #11

Lots of the SaaS products we use mean we don't have to hire more employees. So I'm not sure if dollars per employee is a meaningful stat.

For a lot of companies I think it's actually the key to being able to expand and hire in the first place. Most startups aren't choosing between "should I hire someone to do this, or buy a solution?"--they're choosing between "Can I do this by buying a solution or do we go without? (either this, or something else because we need to build this)"

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#226

Post by runforthehills »

pesfandiar wrote: post #52

This trend has the potential to be a win-win for vendors and customers. Vendors get a more stable and predictable source of revenue, while customers move their pesky lump sum cap-ex to the smoother op-ex payments. Now the question is are those SaaS offerings priced correctly for this to remain sustainable, or will all this break at some point (perhaps catalyzed by an economic slump).

Anecdotally it doesn't seem to break it until you get to the point where you have significant competition. Before that? Nah.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#227

Post by jchw »

optimiz3 wrote: post #188
jchw wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you are trying to be snarky but Valve has accomplished a hell of a lot more than most startups ever will. They are far from perfect (hell, they’re known for bugs and their famously poor timelines, and I heard their game Artifact was not good,) but it’s pretty bizarre to suggest they do nothing. Maintaining Steam alone is huge. It’s hard to find a platform with more vigorous fanboys for good reason. But that al…

Steam has a run rate in the billions! Maintaining something that strong that was built before the last decade is a significant innovation? Most Startups are at least trying to change the status quo.

Yes, it is. Keeping Steam growing and well-liked is an achievement in itself. They never really stood still with it.

Steam certainly challenged the status quo when it was released, and several times in its life.

Hell, who else is working on Linux gaming right now? They were relatively early on game streaming, VR. Steam Workshop? How cool is it that a large amount of one of their flagship games, Team Fortress 2, not only integrated a lot of third party content, but also paid creators back? How cool is it that many games like Counter Strike began as Half Life mods?

I don’t really use Steam much anymore, so it’s not that I’m personally attached much, but I will admit to being pretty impressed.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#228

Post by zozbot234 »

vkou wrote: post #207
zozbot234 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pay for third-party support based on FOSS, and you'll still avoid being locked in to a single supplier.

1. You can, and it makes sense for FOSS projects with real support ecosystems, like RedHat, or for freemium FOSS projects, that explicitly sell support. 2. You can still be locked into a single-supplier when you pay for third-party FOSS support. In fact, most third-party FOSS support comes from a single supplier. 3. FOSS that doesn't have a sustainable business model attached to it rarely serves the needs of enterpri…

> There's FOSS alternatives to Sharepoint, but what's your FOSS alternative to Tableau? Salesforce? Slack?

From a purely technical POV, I'm pretty sure that feasible alternatives exist to all of these, e.g. I don't think Tableau's data viz product does anything that couldn't also be done with relative ease in R. Of course, these commercial offerings extend way beyond the purely technical domain where FLOSS makes the most sense; but that has little to do with "sustainable business models" - R itself is plenty sustainable on its own - and a lot to do with extremely niche or obscure "needs of enterprises" that FLOSS projects are either not clearly aware of, or not very interested in supplying. Niche and obscure problem domains have always been problematic for the open source model, this is nothing new.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#229

Post by runforthehills »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #159

So many companies try to force you onto SaaS. Products that you previously had a perpetual license for are now SaaS only if you want to upgrade. O365 is the only SaaS platform that makes sense where I work. But we have a bunch of SaaS services because that is the only way the product is offered. I hate SaaS.

"Buying the product" means you never get updates and are stuck with legacy junk that slowly gets further and further behind. I'm with everyone else, this is incredibly rose colored.

SaaS at the business level is awesome. For personal use? Okay yeah I'd probably rather own whatever version outright rather than have to keep paying--it isn't going to impact me dramatically like it does a business if it doesn't get regular engineering work done on it.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#230

Post by umeshunni »

XCSme wrote: post #209
robbiemitchell wrote: post #179

You know what costs way more than SaaS? Hiring, managing, and losing people. Leveraging high-quality people with tooling, both for individual functions and for company-wide process, is a no-brainer.

There is also the option of buying self-hosted products and installing them on your own server. The setup time is usually the same, but you only pay $5/mo for the server and maybe $100 one time for the product, instead of paying $100/mo for the service. This is also multiplied by X, where X is the number of subscriptions you have.

But now you need to hire an in house IT team that can manage and install and update those servers and software
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